Ellie has started to poop inside the house. My husband and I are baffled as to why this is. We take her out 4 times a day and stay out there with her. She seems to know to pee outside as she hasnt had any accidents with that and when we go out she almost always pees but she doesnt seem to want to poop outside. We can be out there for 15 minutes and she will start running to the door wanting to come in and then maybe 5 minutes later she is pooping inside. She has been having that growling issue I posted about a while ago where she seems to growl at any dog she sees no matter how far they are. A few of the dogs we have seen are barkers as well and that scares her as she runs and drags me to our door to get in. MY only though is that she has associated outside fearfully some way and no longer wants to poop out there for some reason I was planning on taking her to classes soon (though Im worried she will be coming into heat any day now as she just turned 7 months old today) for the growling issue but do you think they could help with this new pooping issue as well? Any suggestions as to how to make her stop as my husband seems to be quite fed up with it now. Thanks!

StacyC

1st March 2007, 04:33 AM

Don't feel bad! Charlie pooped in the house for a long time. I don't know why, but he did. My advice is not to give her full run of the house. Just restrict her to a small area. You can tell when they have to poop, they do the dance. Just grab her and quickly put her outside... Sorry, I know that that suggestion sucks, but that's all I got :sl*p:

Zippy

1st March 2007, 04:51 AM

If you have your own yard, I'd even take some of the poop outside so the scent is outside. I'd take her with me and let her smell the area, see where you expect her to "go". Then pick the poop up the next day...after she sees it.

When we first got Mary Alice, we had to walk her for about five or ten minutes before she'd poop. ( She's a rescue and all the adjustments were overwhelming her a bit, I think.) Once she settled in, she started to go in the garden.

Good luck, Ellie will catch on soon. :flwr: :flwr:

Cathy Moon

1st March 2007, 04:57 AM

She should be taken out 6 times per day rather than 4.

If you keep her to a regular feeding schedule, you should be able to anticipate what times she will need to poop. Usually walking her when you know she needs to poop will result in a poop. Make sure you give her a treat outside immediately when she does it outside.

Be calm when you're outside waiting for her to poop, don't talk much. Stand and let her sniff around.

Do you have a fenced area, or are you walking her? If you are walking her, is there a place she can go that might seem 'safe' to her (from other dogs)?

JeanKC

1st March 2007, 06:51 AM

Ours have a doogie door... so there's no excuse for the fact that every now and then one them will poop on the rug in front of the fridge. It happened just a couple days ago, for the first time in several weeks. :oops:

KC

murphy's mum

1st March 2007, 08:55 AM

We had the same trouble with Murphy about this age. We had started letting him out our sight believing he was house-broken :sl*p:

Doh! Not a great plan for us, he got to much freedom to soon. Taking the advice of people on here we started from scratch again :?

We restricted him to his den when we were out, or unable to keep both eyes on him. Or took him everywhere with us including the bathroom. He was never left alone in a room, or allowed to go out of the room with out us. This ment we were following him in to get a drink and stuff but over a couple of months we seen an improvement :D

It also ment taking him out a lot more often, sometimes everytime he started to sniff. We started to offer him a small treat when he went too, so now he does his business and comes for his treat. He's 1 now and still on occasion has an accident but not very often.

He never makes a noise to get out or anything though, but does sit an stare at you, which we sometimes miss :roll:

Pavane

5th March 2007, 04:22 AM

We had the same problem with Barkleigh. In fact he's been perfect until this week when we had a lot of rain and he didn't want to stay out. He ran into the corner of our bedroom and hid a surprise. He's 7.5 months.

Our solution was much more vigilance and control which meant the crate any time he was not with us. And since he spends most of the day "at work" with me by my computer, he is tethered to my chair. He has a bed and mats around my desk and a toy basket. He plays, naps etc. I periodically reward him and every hour or so play a bit with him or do some training skills for 5 minutes. I figured out that he needs to go when I need to--so we both take breaks at least every 3 hours. He is perfect in his crate and since about 3 months sleeps in his crate by the bed 8-9 hours a night. We now let him in bed in the early morning and he doesn't even want to go out when we're up--he rather cuddle.